Monday, August 20, 2012

Lame-O Social Media Bubble Deflates (FB; GRPN; ZNGA)

Mr. Gongloff is back in the building (Arianna's not Rupert's):History's Saddest Bubble Deflates: Seven And A Half Things To Know

Thing One: Lamest. Bubble. Ever. Deflates:
Everything was better in the 1990s. Back then, when Republicans hated a
president, they impeached him over a blow job. Now, they just wheel out
children's television clown Donald Trump every now and again to honk and
flap about his birth certificate. Weak.

Same thing with tech bubbles. Back then, everybody in the country got
ludicrously wealthy on moronic tech stocks like Pets.com for a few
years until the bubble exploded, wrecking the economy. Now, we just have
vaguely pathetic social-networking and coupon -- coupon! -- sites like
Facebook, Zynga and Groupon, which got expensive when nobody was paying
much attention, went public, and then immediately lost all their air,
squeaking and farting around the room like the sad end of your worst
birthday party.

All of the people who got sort-of rich on this new "bubble" are
walking away, shaking their heads, including the bullet-shaped head of
serial bubble-pumper Marc Andreesen, an early investor in Groupon. He
and others are cashing out, now that the company has lost three quarters
of its market value since its IPO in November, write Shayndi Raice and Shira Ovide in the Wall Street Journal,
part of a mass exodus from other nouveau-bubble stocks. Zynga's shares
are down 70 percent since their IPO in December. The price of Facebook
shares have been slashed in half since their debut in May, cutting $46
billion from the company's market value. And Facebook could fall farther, now that more shares are being dumped on the public, Bloomberg writes....MORE